How strong is anti-establishment feeling among Northeastern Republicans?

Very.

You can’t get more establishment than Mike Castle. He’s been on the ballot for 40 of the past 44 years. Always won the Republican primary. Always defeated the Democrat. Until 2010. Castle wasn’t taken by surprise — he knew he faced a serious challenger from surging insurgent Christine O’Donnell. He went negative. He turned out his voters. There weren’t enough of them.

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Crashing the country club: A politically incorrect millionaire with a populist touch.

In Delaware, the Republican Party has been taken over by conservative outsiders. An outsider even won the nomination for the House seat Castle surrendered to make his ill-fated Senate run.

New York, too.

Rick Lazio, the party’s favored candidate for governor, was trounced by Buffalo real estate magnate Carl Paladino, a proud, politically incorrect conservative who explains his forwarding of sending racy (and some would say racist) emails as being “human.”

Grassroots conservatives, having abandoned the party’s hand-picked candidate in a congressional special election last year, sent an unmistakable message to their party’s powers-that-were: You’re outta here.

One guy who got the message: Chris Cox, the grandson of Richard Nixon and the son of the state’s Republican Party chairman, finished a poor third in his primary race for Congress. So much for the establishment.

Clearly, this Tea Party revolt is not a Southern — or a Sun Belt — phenomenon. It’s shaking up the GOP coast to coast.

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Sarah Palin is the undisputed queen of the Mama Grizzlies.

How powerful is the Sarah Palin brand among Republicans?

Very.

Candidates backed by the former Alaska governor have won more than 80 percent of their primaries nationally. Last night, O’Donnell credited Palin with helping her win her race. In New Hampshire, Palin’s support may have helped Attorney General Kelly Ayotte — dubbed the Granite Grizzy by Palin — blunt a last-minute charge by even-more-conservative Ovide Lamontagne.

What happens when the Tea Party is divided?

A Tea Party united is stronger than a Tea Party divided.

In New York, Team Tea was unified and Paladino rocked the establishment.

In Delaware, the Tea Party Express and Sarah Palin backed O’Donnell, while former Texas congressman Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks groups remained neutral. The Tea Party favorite won, 53 percent to 47 percent.

In New Hampshire, Tea Party factions were split and the results were, too. The Senate race between Ayotte (the choice of Palin and pro-life groups) and Lamontagne (the choice of South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint and the conservative Manchester Union-Leader) remains too close to call, with Ayotte up by about 1,000 votes in incomplete results.

But unlike Delaware, Tea Partiers in the Granite State will end up with a conservative Republican nominee, whichever candidate emerges victorious.

Will ethics charges end a legendary congressman’s career?

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Change? Not in this race. Rangel romps.

No!

The opposition was divided three ways, and New York Rep. Charles Rangel cruised to renomination in New York City. Rangel, who lost his job as House Ways & Means Committee chairmen amid a House Ethics Committee probe of his personal finances, remains an icon at home. And Democratic voters aren’t as mad at incumbents or business-as-usual as Republicans are.

Will a former Democratic rising star see his career flame out?

Yes.

Four years ago after being named a rising star in the Democratic Party, Washington’s 40-year-old mayor, Adrian Fenty, is a lame duck. The young reformer, who promised to weed out corruption in the city government and clean up a school system considered by many education experts to be the nation’s worst, was denied renomination by a 67-year-old party regular, D.C. council chairman Vincent Gray. Unions, angered by Fenty’s reformist agenda, backed Gray. So much for change we can believe in.

Can Democrats lose another Kennedy seat?

Check back with us in a month.

Providence Mayor David Cicilline won the Democratic nomination for the House seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Patrick Kennedy. But he only mustered about one-third of the vote in a divisive primary, which saw one rival run ads calling him “possibly the most ineffective mayor in the city’s history.” The big winner Tuesday was Republican nominee John J. Loughlin II.

This is a Democratic district. But, as Abraham Lincoln famously said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

Rick Dunham of the Houston Chronicle is a leading expert on journalists' use of social media and niche web sites. He created Texas on the Potomac in 2007. He also is the president of the National Press Club Journalism Institute, the educational and charitable arm of the world's leading professional organization for journalists.

About Capitol Confidential

Capitol Confidential gathers the best coverage of New York politics and puts it all together. Each section - Capitol, The State Worker, New York on the Potomac, and Voices - represents a unique facet of the political scene. The Capitol section features coverage from the Times Union Capitol bureau. The State Worker is dedicated to state worker issues. New York on the Potomac offers news of interest to New Yorkers from Washington. And Voices features the best of everything else, pointing you to columnists and bloggers from across the Web.